This is the idea I’ve been trying to place with again, really starting just this week, rejecting the consensus about how to blog that’s emerged over the last couple years, and holds up Digg-ability and Techcrunch-i-tude as good indicators. Dan, of course, said it better.

It’s probably an indicator of slipping into my dotage, but a new stray link and I’m happily back wandering through those early archives, even my own, having stumbled across a rather odd review of the rather minor Ruled Britannia, circa 2003 earlier this evening.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-translation

Like Brian, I’ll have some exciting news to announce soon, and hopefully a return to blogging in the near future.

4 Years

4 years ago Monday, we had just moved out of our apartment in SF having moved to the city at the worst possible time to try to find jobs, Jasmine was back East lining up a design job in Boston, and I had just gotten back from a walk on one of my beloved Santa Cruz beaches, and decided that writing about it would make a good first blog entry.)

Plans

Some of the work on adding tags (and tag combos), and related entries (see middle-right column when viewing an entry) was an initial attempt, as was the Zeitgeist-esque archives page. But I never really was able to take it as far as I wanted. Why?

1. Insufficient time to implement grandiose schemes
2. Changes I made were invisible to aggregators, and therefore most people have never seem them
3. No one else is as interested in my old content as I am

But I still thinks it’s an interesting an unsolved problem. Google is not always the best entry point to the world’s knowledge, chronologically new-new-new is perhaps not the best way to tell our personal stories.

From the Archives

Just found a post calling for a repository of community patterns from April 2002 similar to Clay’s Moderation Strategies.

http://beebo.org/metalog/

• Cat-Blogging from Deep Time
• Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people?

http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4

This seems 100% wrong to me. Almost a betrayal of the bright and shiny promise of RSS.

As a Blogger

Part of what makes blogging a sustainable medium for personal publishing is I don’t have to publish every day, every week, or every month. I’m secure in the knowledge that when I do publish, my audience will still be there.

A TV station can’t do this, a newspaper can’t do this, and so they’re forced into a professionalization of media creation which is by and large unsustainable. (hence the poor quality of the evening news, wouldn’t it be nice if they only put out a report when they actually had some news to report on?)

As a Subscriber

I subscribe to a number of feeds that are only updated when something goes wrong. My server goes down, my page stops validating, there is an emergency weather alert. I need the confidence to subscribe, and then forget about these feeds secure in the knowledge that they’ll still be there when needed. (otherwise I’ll have nagging doubts, and might as well just check a website daily, this is what GTD is all about as I understand it, the confidence to forget)

As a Developer

I don’t get the motivation. A dormant feed is nearly zero cost. It isn’t changing so conditional GETs reduce the cost to the aggregator and the provider. It isn’t updating, so there is no cognitive cost to the reader. I don’t get the motivation.

Please if a feed goes long term 404, 410, 500, etc, sure unsubscribe, rather then pounding them forever. But a feed simply gone quiet? That would be a shame.

Wrong Problem

The real problem is some way to automatically detect feeds which are no longer interesting. And even then I usually hold on against the day they’ll swerve back to what I started reading them for. (usually I enjoy the detours, but sometimes…) One of the beauties of del.icio.us is it explicitly allows people to be multi-facetted, and I think our aggregator tools need to start being more aware of this.

caveat, I haven’t actually used FeedDemon’s feature (not being a Windows user), it merely reminded me of this worrying, dare I call it wrong headed, trend.

And while a number of things are still broken, I feel like its starting to take shape, and Typo/Rails as an infinitely hackable framework gives me the chance to play with ideas I’ve been mulling over for a while, on how to present and reference the growing archives we all have. (only the skeleton of which is yet showing)

update: Comments fixed, again. (thanks Ruby for the heads up)

update2: My CSS-fu isn’t up to it (or perhaps my concentration is just shot right now), but the original artistic vision called for the magpie to float behind the MLPs. (ideally blurred slightly by a translucency) Anyone able to help?

Not Seeing Eye to Eye with WordPress

WordPress was my first choice. I’ve tried upgrading to WP for a few times, but each times I try I get stymied. WP just isn’t flexible enough out of the box and the code is badly in need of refactoring. Might just be an impedance mismatch between me and WP.

Typo, Up On a Too High Pedestal

Next up was Typo. Now I know there is a codebase that is poetry, Typo is the gold standard of Rails apps, and I’ve referred to it when coding my own Rails apps.

Unfortunately when I checked on #typo, the recommended upgrade path from MT2.x was via MT3.x, and it doesn’t use the MT’s import/export feature, but rather direct database manipulation.

Moveable Type 3, the Sound of Settling

So now I’ve got a running MT3 install, and I think I’m just going to stay here, at least for tonight. I am struck again how much polish 6A puts into their apps. Bayesian comment filtering looks promising, Brad’s tagging implementation looks promsing, and I’ve always liked MT’s DSL for templates. (that said I’m currently missing the flexibilty of ERB + layouts)

Not sure I’m going to stay there, but I’m staying there for tonight, as I’m tired.

http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000505.html

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func=viewSubmission&sid=789

http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008482.html

http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2005/03/07/wherearethewomenofweblogging/

http://blogmarks.net/

http://blog.larixconsulting.com/blog/_archives/2005/2/23/368505.html

http://rc3.org/cgi-bin/less.pl?arg=6694

http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/46_Shitcanned.html